Dad was in bed; Mom and I were in the sitting room drinking red wine. My palms were sweating. People in my family don’t emigrate. They live around the corner and invite each other over for pizza.
I saw the clock hit midnight; today, Luke and I would be looking at flights, at apartments. I downed the last of my wine and blurted it out.
‘Luke and I are moving. To London.’
‘What?’ said Mom, holding her empty wine glass. ‘Why?’
I was defensive.
‘What do you mean “Why?” Why not? We’re young. It’s something Luke and I have thought about.’
My mom made a scoffing noise.
‘And that means …?’ I snapped.
‘You’ve talked about going to California. You’ve even talked about going to Asia. But you’ve never mentioned Europe, especially not England. You hate being cold, Harriet! But you know who loves England? Luke. Luke, of course, loves England.’
I stayed silent because there was no denying it. And yes, Luke loved English football and British beer. He had visited once and spoke regularly about how desperate he was to go back. He wanted to become a Londoner, at least temporarily.
‘Well, what’s so wrong with that?’ I snapped. ‘Luke’s my boyfriend. I can think about what he wants, too.’
‘And what about work?’ she asked.
Just that week, I had experienced my own songs being performed on stage for the first time and it was mesmerising, that feeling of pride. I sat there beaming and looking down, watching people’s feet in the audience tap to music I had written, my mom and dad on either side of me squeezing my hands intermittently with grins as wide as their faces. Luke couldn’t make it: he had a colleague’s leaving do.
But for once, I didn’t care what Luke was doing. Watching that musical was a natural high I’d never known and I think in retrospect, what was known as happiness. But I could get that again, couldn’t I? In London. Probably.
‘I’m heartbroken that you’re leaving, of course I am,’ Mom had said the night I told her. ‘But if you were going to follow a dream, that would be one thing. You’re not.’
I’d flinched and lied, like you do when the uncomfortable truth is levelled at you.
‘We’ve been talking about it for a long time. Together.’
‘Seems unlikely,’ she’d said, wine glass still in hand.
I’d known the drink had given her confidence and it made me disconcerted; normally, we could avoid rows about Luke with omissions and gloss.
‘You know the truth? Everything you two do is decided by Luke. The area you live in, the holidays you take, all those London pictures and British paintings in your room. And it worries your dad and me. You used to be independent, Harriet, go your own way.’
I’d laughed.
‘Go my own way?’ I’d said, nasty. ‘You don’t want me to go my own way. You want me to go your way. Turn up at church every Sunday. Visit Grandma every Wednesday. Never break the mould.’
I saw her hurt in the lamplight but adrenaline was flooding me now. She had attacked Luke and that, to me, was licence to say anything I wished, to anyone, whenever I wanted.
‘You know I was bullied at school?’ I’d said spontaneously.
I saw the shock on her face; I had never told her for the reason many children don’t tell their parents. It would have hurt her too much. Worse than it hurt me. I could handle it; she couldn’t.
‘Every day,’ I’d said, quieter, less aggressive as I felt tears flooding my eyes despite the fact that I started this conversation. ‘Every single day. I did go my own way, for many years, but it wasn’t the right way – it was a way that made me a target and a laughing stock. Being with Luke has changed everything for me. I have friends. My life is unrecognisable.’
She’d sat down. We’d stayed on the sofa for ten minutes in silence, her still holding the stem of the empty wine glass tight then finally putting it down and taking my hand instead.
‘Or maybe,’ she’d said quietly, ‘finding your confidence has changed everything. Finding a career that you love and that you’re made to do. Maybe it’s not Luke, Harriet, maybe it’s you.’
I’d snatched my hand away and refuted it then gone to bed.
In the morning, Luke and I had booked flights and I’d edited my website to tell potential employers that I would from now on be based in London. Luke, despite my leading questions, still hadn’t even mentioned my work or asked what I would do. We talked about his plans daily.
My mom and I never revisited the conversation, but it didn’t leave my mind and it was one of the things that contributed to the distance between us. On some level, I blamed her and my dad for what happened – like they had sabotaged Luke and I and our future with their negativity from the very beginning.
31
Lexie
February
The baby crying next door is getting under my skin. I think about my lack and it is a visceral reminder of someone else’s luck. I think about Tom lying to me, being something other than Tom.
I sit on the sofa and am not sure I can ever get up. When Harriet starts singing, I feel like I need to stifle her, quiet her. The charge of aggression scares me.
Tom and I had been together for over ten years when we started trying for a baby, more than two years ago now. Friends were doing it; babies were entering our realm and dribbling all over it.
‘I think I’m ready to be a dad,’ Tom said to me through a mouthful of sashimi.
We were out for his birthday in a Japanese restaurant that was fancy enough for its Michelin star but tasty like Nandos on a hangover.
And now my stomach was flipping too much to eat. He knew how much I wanted a child; I had been ready for a while, waiting for him.
‘I’m thirty-two now and I can picture it,’ he continued.
‘Is this a ruse, Tom?’ I asked, faux-sharp. ‘To get more sushi because I am too excited to eat? Because it’s worked. Have the tuna. Eat the bloody salmon.’
I paused. Wiped my forehead. Then I looked back at him.
‘Are you serious?’ I smiled.
‘Deadly,’ he said while doing a rudimentary impression of a shark.
The first time we had unprotected sex we talked afterwards about baby names. Naive optimists, thinking that was all it took.
But two weeks later, my period was late.
I took a Prosecco at a barbecue but pictured a tiny embryo saturated in alcohol and swapped it for a Coke.
‘I think I have got a metallic taste in my mouth,’ I told Tom on the tube home, grin crossing a face that had been buried in my phone, googling pregnancy signs.
I bought the first pregnancy test of my life. At the counter I felt fifteen, panicking someone would tell my mum. My brain hadn’t caught up to know that we were adults and the ‘yes’ outcome was the good one.
And the ‘yes’ outcome was the one we got. I was pregnant – that easily – and we celebrated and we talked endlessly about this new life that awaited us. About this person, growing.
I stopped eating Brie and stayed twenty metres from white wine at all times. I called Kit.
‘Are you telling Mum and Dad?’ he said, grin nearly busting out of the FaceTime screen. ‘Or is it a bit early?’
Unsaid, we knew that Kit was the centre of my familial world – that he had the parent role – and that my actual parents were secondary.
‘A bit early,’ I said, being sensible without really believing I needed to be. ‘I just had to tell you. But let’s wait until the scan for everyone else.’
But a couple of weeks later, as quickly as it stuck, it unstuck.
‘It’ll happen again,’ said Tom as I sobbed in his arms. ‘This happens to lots of people, but the good thing is that you can get pregnant easily.’
I nodded. Underneath my sadness, I knew that, too. We just had to get through this part.
Except fertility doesn’t work with order and precision. What I learnt afterwards is that there are no rules or logic.
A book would say I should have been able to get pregnant again; a body decides differently.
And after that my period turned up every month; the unwelcome colleague who everyone hoped wouldn’t rock up at after-work drinks but always did, eager to make their unwanted presence felt.
Now, I heave myself up from the bed, because that unwelcome colleague is here, again. I go to get a tampon from my underwear drawer and freeze. Because in there are knickers. They are not mine. They are the Marilyn Monroe of knickers to my sensible M&S. They are the worst thing I have ever seen, for everything they symbolise, confirm and everything I know that I am now going to have to deal with.
32
Harriet
My parents are polite even when they are disapproving and so despite my mother voicing her thoughts on my relationship with Luke, they did what they believed parents should do when their child is emigrating. They dropped me off at the airport. They told me to eat vegetables. They wept when I peeled myself out of their hugs. They made me promise to text when I landed.
‘Look after her,’ said David to Luke in the arrival hall.
‘I’ll look after myself,’ I said, mock-outraged but then glancing at Luke quickly, in case that sounded like I was dismissing him.
Luke was too distracted by his phone to have noticed. I exhaled.
I didn’t know, then, quite how much I could look after myself. How far I could go. That actually, rather than the one who should be scared, I was the one to fear.
‘You can look after yourself most of the time,’ David quipped, ‘I’m talking about when you get drunk.’
I started to tease him about a drunken night out he’d had the week before that was far more extreme than anything I had done recently, but Luke talked over me, mid-flow.
‘We need to go,’ he said, brusque. ‘Get through security.’
I saw my mom note the interruption.
It was left for David to give the whispered last-minute aside into my ear.
‘I am here,’ he said, holding my head in his hands. ‘Any time, whatever time zone.’
He kissed my forehead.
I nodded, unable to speak because I was so overwhelmed by how much I missed him already. How could his scent cross the Atlantic? How could a look, a shared eye-roll at our parents? How could just being together, silently, like siblings are? I was trying so hard to hold in my sobs that I gagged and he held me tightly.
But later, I laughed, too. What would I, a together grown-up travelling abroad with a partner, need my naive little brother for?
The next time I saw him, he’d have flown halfway across the world to pick me up from a police station.
33
Lexie
February
I am lying on my bed working out how to speak to Tom. Trying to muster the energy, even though, conversely, my heart is racing. I touch my skin. I pinch my knee. Am I the same? Is there anything about this Lexie that resembles the old one? Can I blame Tom, really, for any of this?
In retrospect, I think, when I left my job behind, I left myself behind.
I handed in my notice, breathed a sigh of relief that now I would relax and get pregnant again, and headed out on my leaving do. It was like a hen do. A final hurrah to my old non-mum self.
I danced to Nineties pop music on a square of dance floor in the corner of a bar and between us we drunk forty-five half-priced strawberry cocktails that somebody’s contact had ‘sorted out’.
‘Just do not drink any more,’ Shona told me. ‘Their cocktails are normally fourteen pounds each.’
‘How many have we had?’ somebody shouted when we went to the bar to order more.
Twenty-five. Thirty-six. Forty-two. At forty-five, the fifteen of us who were drinking switched immediately to cheap white wine. Life in journalism: feast or famine, if famine is the house Pinot Grigio.
I drunk fast and happily and didn’t leave until I realised I couldn’t remember what happened three minutes ago or which bus I was supposed to get home. And so I got in a cab, texting Tom that I was en route.
I’m growing up, I thought, nostalgic for this moment already as I fought the urge to vomit out of the taxi window. Now, the next stage of life would start. I pictured myself visiting my former colleagues in the office, my baby strapped to me in a sling, breastfeeding in the meeting room, a face from the past to them already.
I stumbled out of the taxi clutching a bag of leaving gifts with a soppy, drunken grin on my face.
I stopped on the pavement to send an important message to my colleagues.
I LOVE YOU, I wrote. It took me ten minutes.
WE LOVE YOU TOO, Shona replied. Though leaving your own leaving do first is shit.
But I got away with it. I had been the last woman standing at most other nights out until recently. I was the first to sign up for an after-work wine and if anywhere had an inch of dance floor, I was usually in the centre of it with my hands in the air trying to get the attention of a DJ regarding the immediate playing of some Destiny’s Child.
Now, though, things were different. I had told Tom a couple of months earlier that I wanted to go freelance. It had been nearly a year now since the miscarriage and nothing had happened. I wanted to make a change, to get a better work-life balance and be more relaxed. He said he would support whatever I wanted. Thanks to his parents’ generosity with the flat, we had few financial pressures; we were free to make these choices.
But still, I was bereft. My colleagues and I had the camaraderie of people who spent ten-hour days side by side then went to the pub with each other to dissect them. We were more comfortable in each other’s company than flatmates; we had an ease that I had never known with anyone but my family and Tom.
This is the right thing, though, I told myself as I missed them over the coming weeks and months. A baby is the priority now.
I set myself up as a business, writing and – as I failed to get pregnant and depression kicked in – moving further away from that funny, smart woman surrounded by friends in the middle of the dance floor with her hands high in the air. And now, I lie here on my bed, and not for the first time I sob with loss and grief for everything that I was, that I was going to be, and everything that I cannot imagine I can ever be again.
34
Harriet
February
On social media, Tom has posted an old picture of him and Lexie to celebrate their anniversary. In it they are windswept and beautiful on a beach in Scotland. They are joyous, smiling so widely that they have lines around their eyes. But they don’t care, because this is happiness, the modern version – see, happiness is not caring that you have crow’s feet, even if you have put three filters on your picture and made it black and white.
Tom has added a comment: Here’s to the next fifty years, it says, smug, unbearable.
How can this be happening? I’ve been to their flat five times since the first visit. It’s easy, once you’ve crossed the line. And it’s odd what can become normal. I think of my months in the hospital: how eventually, it started to feel like home.
When I go to their flat I plant things, take things … sometimes I just roam. After I leave, I drop leaflets, play baby cries. But still, they seem happy. Tom and Lexie, and their perpetual fucking happiness.
I turn my music up to an unsociable volume just to piss Lexie off and to ruin her anniversary. I set up a new social media account and send a single message to her, mocking her appearance. She blocks the account and then I hear sobbing. Lexie is the thinnest glass, so easy to break if you feel the urge come over you. And I do, actually. Often.
35
Lexie
February
I am on social media, without noticing that I have logged on to social media, and there is a message. I thought the one I had the other day telling me how ugly I was had been upsetting. This, from a girl named Rachel, is worse.
I’ve been swapping pictures with your boyfriend, it says. Ask him. Or just ask yourself if he’s been acting differently
.
Does this happen? In real life and not just to Z-list celebrities or nineteen-year-olds? Then I realise that I am not dismissing it. Ask yourself if he has been acting differently. I ask. I get an affirmative.
Minutes later, and my brain has taken me to a worse place. Is it, I think, even just pictures? I think about the condoms. About the weird feeling that someone has been in the flat. About the fact that somehow, I am burying the moment that I found someone else’s underwear in my drawer.
I need to think, through the fog that now makes up my brain. Tom is central to my life and Rachel could be a robot, for all I know.
And yet … Things are adding up, they’re making sense.
If Tom did this, I think, then I would have to make decisions about my relationship at a time when that relationship is a constant I really need to stay on course. I know how weak it sounds. I know how weak it is.
While I’m online, I read Tom’s homage to our anniversary and I scoff. And suddenly weakness is superseded by blind rage. What sort of victim finds someone else’s underwear in her drawer and doesn’t push it? I accepted his dismissal. I buried it. I vibrate, suddenly, with everything I should have shouted and screamed and emitted, until he had told me the truth.
Tom is still in Sweden and has posted a picture taken when we used to go on spontaneous weekend breaks and talk about life goals and joining the Labour Party and what we could do about global warming and where we might want to eat Thai food next week. A picture from the easy past, delivered from the complicated present.
Before I know what I am doing, I am FaceTiming him.
‘Happy anniversary!’ he chirps, face giant in my laptop screen.
‘Are you cheating on me?’ I ask and he laughs, but awkwardly. Adrenaline surges.
‘What?’
‘That’s what people say to these questions when they need to buy time to think, Tom.’
Through the Wall Page 12